In today’s complex world, it pays to have all the bases covered.
Contracting, licensing, support, communication: every customer touchpoint is a moment in which an enterprise can disappoint or impress.
Unsurprisingly, there can be a lot riding on either outcome.
Throw into the mix all of the opportunities to capture, analyse and act upon data generated by those touchpoints and it’s easy to understand why the effectiveness of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is now so high on the agenda.
Problem is, there are many more different CRMs out there than there are communication channels; which makes for a challenging backdrop against which enterprises must somehow always ensure they are seeing the whole picture.
And that makes integrating them about as important as it gets.
“There are three components of brilliant customer relationship management - a single platform through which all of an enterprise’s communications flow; a feature-rich CRM platform which provides a single view of that activity; and the seamless integration of them both,” says Andriy Zhylenko, CEO of global provider of telco billing, cloud PBX platforms and CPaaS, PortaOne, which is helping deliver excellence in this space.
Its white-labelled Communication Platform-as-a Service (CPaaS) solution ‘PortaSwitch’ is deployed and monetised by, among others, innovative partner CloudCall – smart, fast-growing provider of intelligent phone systems that integrate calls, chats, and the resulting data directly into customers’ CRM platforms.
It is a potent collaboration which began 11 years ago and which is delivering growth on both sides.
CloudCall made a decision to differentiate itself from other telcos selling phone services, bundles, minutes or PBX seats.
Their value proposition for SMBs was simple: a service that will make sales, recruitment and marketing more efficient. Higher closing rates, increased revenue and reduced operating expenses – all for a highly-affordable monthly subscription.
CloudCall picked a market-leading CRM in a specific niche vertical – such as travel agencies and auto-dealerships etc. - and created a tailored, integrated package. Success followed, so it expanded into other sectors with other integrated CRMs.
Having started many years ago (the business was called Synety back then) with an entry-level PortaSwitch, it grew significantly and currently serves thousands of subscribers and operates two powerful, high-availability PortaSwitch systems in the UK and US.
“CloudCall’s in-house team leverages the open architecture, power and flexibility of PortaSwitch to build customised, seamless CRM integrations for its end user organisations,” says Zhylenko.
“As a result, they are able to quickly create new integrated packages that provide customer organisations with a single, bundled package of CRM, calls, visibility and analytics.
“It has a growing team that's completely in-house and dedicated to designing vertical-specific CRM functionality so it is clear that demand is increasing.
